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We have written elsewhere about the “great delamination” between our nuanced, open-ended, ambiguous, opportunity-laden infinite analogue world, and the finite, historical, polarising online world. They are not equivalents and to assume they are is to make a dangerous category error. | We have written elsewhere about the “great delamination” between our nuanced, open-ended, ambiguous, opportunity-laden infinite analogue world, and the finite, historical, polarising online world. They are not equivalents and to assume they are is to make a dangerous category error. | ||
===Working in your jim-jams=== | |||
I have, throughout this piece mischievously referred to home workers in their jim-jams, eating ice-cream from the tub in a onesie on the sofa whilst dialed into a conference call and generally insinuating that remote workers might be, well, phoning it in. (That is, literally, the origin of the expression, “phoning it in”.) | |||
This provokes outrage among some,l. I freely admit it is intended to. | |||
“It is just wrong for you to imply that people who work from home necessarily take it easy. Some people have family commitments and personal circumstances being their control which mean they have to work from home. And look, dammit, this is not the nineteen fifties. We are not living in a some episode of ''Mad Men''. Smell the coffee, JC. Some people, frankly, just choose to work from home. They work better that way. We have the tools and capabilities, so why the hell ''shouldn’t'' they? They can be just as effective as the most grinding tube-jockey. It is grossly unfair of you to generalise.” | |||
Now every word of this is true. But not one grasps the point, which is that this can all be true while a significant portion of home workers do take the Mickey , but more to the point, many office jockeys, deep in their blackest heart, will harbour this conviction. Punters actually do think this. It might not be fair, but they do. People are human: they justify themselves, like any pattern-matching generaliser, they make generalisations. Such as all other things being equal the more committed people ''turn up''. (This is literally what it means to say, “I don't know what happened there. The Aresenal just didn’t turn up”.) | |||
These metaphors tell us something deep about our cultural values. “He put a shift in”. “She really stood up.” “They represented.” “She went missing in action.” “he was awol”. “she seemed distant and uninvolved.” “She had real ''presence''.” “This is all a bit remote”. | |||